my kind of catharsis.

Tag: Brexit

I keep coming back to Brexit because it’s all that has been in the news this week. But one man has mainly stayed out of the limelight, even though he is to blame for much of this mess: David Cameron.

He should be made to answer to the British public. Thanks to his decision to call an EU referendum two-and-a-half years ago, this country is now in an almighty state and he’s got away with it. He called a referendum with no caveats and no criteria in place, just breezed on with smug arrogance while the Leave campaign shouted their propaganda via loudspeaker to anyone who would listen. He caused all this in the first place and then resigned and swanned off with his wife to go on a permanent holiday when things didn’t go his way, leaving everyone else to clear up the mess. Why has he not been called to account?

People voted for Brexit because they thought they were going to resurrect the British Empire and get loads of money back from the EU, while rounding up all the foreigners overnight and sending them back where they belong and keeping our bendy bananas (the same bananas that they leave on the supermarket shelf because it’s ‘too knobbly’, but I digress). Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage egged things on and let’s face it, it wasn’t that difficult to do so – just poke the beehive and watch the masses (or the 52%) get angry.

Cameron never gave an adequate response to these lies. He never said that if you voted to leave, you would lose the travel privileges that you currently enjoy and take for granted, such as being waived quickly through passport control; you might lose your timeshare in Spain because their authorities will want you out and put their citizens first; the budget airlines would increase their prices; the NHS and other industries would be at breaking point because all the foreign workers who keep things afloat will be sent back to their countries. He would have been right to say this – but he didn’t. Instead, he allowed the Leave lot to spout their hysterical nonsense (which they backtracked on THE NEXT DAY) almost without any comeback because he foolishly believed the British people would come good.

He didn’t even put any rules in place. For example, the result must have a gap of, say, 6% or more (e.g: 53% to 47%) in order for it to be binding. It was a botch job from the beginning. He inexplicably won the general election by a landslide the year before and got cocky and look what happened. The entire country has now gone to shit while he’s (as Danny Dyer said in his outstanding rant) ‘gone to Nice with his trotters up. WHERE IS THE GEEZER?’

Theresa May is going full steam ahead with her plan. During the week, she held a press conference where she started with such oddly defeatist language that I thought she was about to resign. But she led us on a merry dance and went, ‘Haha, I’m not going anywhere – choke on it, suckers!’

Her deal will likely see the UK give the EU obscene amounts of money while having no say in what happens next within the Union. It sounds ridiculous but what did you Leavers expect – that they would rollover and let us carry on regardless because we’re British and therefore, far superior to those pesky foreigners? They want to make us pay and won’t budge because they are the ones in control- and who can blame them? Surely it made more sense to remain in the EU because, as I have said before, we should keep our friends close and our enemies closer. When you’ve got Russian warplanes flying on the edge of the British Isles for fun and potential terror attacks while the police force is being depleted and budgets slashed, we need to be a part of this union.

Sadly, I think it’s too late to have a People’s Vote. We only have four months until we leave and, much as I like to think positively, I can’t see a second referendum being called anytime soon.

But back to Cameron, that treacherous bollock.

Let’s be honest, he couldn’t do anything but resign during that tumultuous morning after the referendum. He got cocky, he gambled and he lost and he did not want to lead the negotiations to leave the EU. That said, his resignation showed that he had no plan B in case he did not win, which shows how terrible he was as Prime Minister. One must always have a back-up plan when you are in such a position and his smugness royally backfired on him. But he still got off scot-free from the subsequent shitfest and it is not right, because he was the one who kicked all this off and led us down this mad path. If it wasn’t for him and his supreme arrogance, I wouldn’t have been drowning my sorrows in the pub that Friday afternoon post-vote result, cursing his very existence.

He has never apologised for the mess he created and left. He should be ashamed of himself.

Yes unfortunately, the time has come for Brexit and for those of us who voted to remain, there’s not a lot we can do about it. We have to endure the incredibly smug faces of Farage, David Davis and the like blabbing haughtily about how Brexit will be A Good Thing (even though they don’t have a clue what’s going to happen next).

As I wrote after the referendum was done and dusted, many Brexiteers seem to think that Britain still has an empire and we can lord it over our foreign neighbours. They think that we can swan into negotiations, demand what we want and not face any consequences for what we have voted for. They think that other member states of the EU such as Germany and France will not (for want of a better word) punish us for leaving. What a load of bollocks.
The EU will be driving a hard bargain and will make life very difficult for us when the negotiations begin. And when those talks are in the hands of the likes of our foreign secretary Boris Johnson, you’d be right for thinking that this could turn into an almighty shitfest.

I keep hearing the phrase ‘global Britain’ being used over the past few days. What does that even mean? It’s just another bullshit soundbite- an empty phrase meant to have the public nodding their heads furiously in agreement even if they are as baffled as I am. If they mean ‘global’ as in selling our companies and industries off to China, Saudi Arabia and America, leaving us with no industries to truly call British then yes, they might be right.

So Day One in the Big Brexit House and everything has gone to hell.
The people (52% of them) have spoken and the result is that we are leaving the European Union. In the aftermath of the shock result, our Prime Minister resigned on the steps of 10 Downing Street two hours later and social media went into meltdown. The Chancellor, George Osborne, appears to have gone into hiding. You couldn’t get rid of his face during the campaign- now nobody has seen him for several days.
People who voted to remain in the EU are clinging to a faint hope that they can somehow overturn the decision via petition. They say that the referendum was not legally binding. Now, I wanted to stay in the EU and as much as I disagree with the decision of ‘the people’, we cannot disregard it and stamp our feet like children because we dont like how it turned out.

Some people who voted to leave have regretted their decision since they went to the ballot box, thinking that their vote ‘wouldn’t count’. I’m not sure how these grown people could have such a mind-bogglingly stupid way of thinking but well, you learn something new every day. The world and his wife knew that this vote would be very close and could go either way but you thought this- the most important decision made by the British people for a generation -was one big irrelevance and your vote was the same. Well, you made your bed (a bed we all have to lie in, the most uncomfortable bed possible) and we all have to lie in it. In other words, like those memes you see on social media, we have to deal with it.

The EU want Britain to get out as soon as possible. Boris Johnson said yesterday that there was ‘no rush’ to leave, which is funny considering how much he was urging us to do so with haste before last Thursday. Our European neighbours ‘urgently’ want us to trigger the mysterious-sounding Article 50 so they can kick our backsides to the kerb and get on with their lives and their union. They are not here for sitting and waiting for us to pack our bags and wave us off at the door. They are the person who’s throwing their cheating lover’s clothes out of the window as the whole neighbourhood watches while shouting, ‘I DON’T NEED YOU.’ And rightly so. The arrogance of the Leave campaigners is astonishing. Why should they wait for us to get our shit together?

The EU powers-that-be are furious with David Cameron because his resignation will not take effect until October. As a result, changes cannot be made until then and naturally, the EU are probably looking for loopholes right now, trying to find a way to get us out immediately.

Nigel Farage has popped up on my TV far too often during this event considering he is not an elected member of parliament. His smug grinning face has annoyed the hell out of me and I hoped- really hoped -that once this was over, he would be too. But no, that would be too simple, wouldn’t it? So get ready for him to be plastered across our screens on Question Time from now til the end of time.

That said, he and his cronies have started back-pedalling on a number of issues. The £350m a week they will ‘reclaim’ from the EU will not go into the NHS because that amount of money was a barefaced lie. Although it was emblazoned on the side of their bus throughout their campaign, he admitted that it was (and I quote) ‘a big mistake’.

Immigration will not stop overnight and gates will not rise from the ground at the cliffs of Dover to stop all those pesky immigrants coming in and taking our jobs, our women, etc. It will take a few years for certain things to be implemented and any issues to be smoothed out, but some people seemed to think that this would happen.

I live in London (or as it is now known, the ‘London bubble’) where the majority voted to remain in the EU and it felt like everyone was waiting for the pub to open at 8 o’clock in the morning because they were so downhearted about the result. My friend took the afternoon off work because he was so angry. Seeing people’s reactions to the result was an eye-opener. Some were crying out of sheer disappointment, few were quietly elated, some were stoic, trying to be optimistic and just got on with it…then they got drunk as skunks.

What happens next? Who knows. Not even the winning side know. Everyone is waited on tenterhooks and craning their necks to see. I’m just taking stock and reflecting on what has happened.